Your wi-fi knows what you look like
In this paper, researchers from Cornell University proved that they could use wi-fi signals to recognize the shape of an individual reliably, even in a crowded room.
The technology uses the well-known principles of wave diffraction. The electromagnetic waves in the wi-fi signal sent by the router bounce around the room, off you, the walls, and any object in the vicinity. By applying algorithms to the waves that bounce back, the room, and the individuals in it, can be mapped.
If there are only 2 people in the room, this method can detect each individual with 95% accuracy. When the number of people in the room increases to 6, that accuracy only dips to 75%. However, it’s easy to imagine accuracy approaching 100%, with upwards of 6 people, once the technology is refined and developed by the open market.
The implications of this are truly staggering. For commerce, it provides for the Internet of Things a simple, non-intrusive way of monitoring your movement. Your technology knows where you are, and can anticipate your movements to make your life easier. No tracking chip, cell-phone, or bar-code required.
On the other-hand, privacy advocates have a new, very big reason to be concerned. Simply by using the wi-fi that is already ubiquitous in our society, any government agency that cared to will have accurate knowledge of where you are at any given moment, as long as you are in reach of a wi-fi signal. There will be no opting-out by leaving your phone at home.
When combined with exterior mapping (Google Maps), interior mapping (Pokemon GO), and now accurate personal tracking, it’s theoretically possible to have a real-time reproduction of reality, running in parallel on a server farm.
Total Informational Awareness was a program started by the US Information Awareness Office in 2003. It’s stated goal was to gather all possible personal information on US citizens, for the purposes of predictive policing. This understandably upset many people, and the program was shut down. However, according to this NY Times article from 2012, the informational architecture of the system was simply re-purposed to the NSA, where it is “quietly thriving.”
With the integration of technology into our daily lives, demands for our personal information and location have grown so numerous that we typically accede without much of a fight. With the prospect of a real-time global map of human activity at the fingertips of whoever is in power, a public discussion about our level of comfort with surveillance from our technology needs to be had. As designers, it’s especially important that we consider the implications of the technology we work on, and be wary of supporting projects without regard to our beliefs.
